8

March 1703

A place far from the sea

My bedchamber overlooks a small walled garden, not grand enough to be called an orchard, planted with trees of apples, plums and greengages, like the ones that graced my boyhood home. The trees are bare of fruit or leaves today. They were put in during a lovely spring half a century ago, with Mary leaning on the rake and me taking mountains of flint stone out of the chalky soil. They back on to an empty sheep paddock, sloping upwards, and on either side endless fields, now just brimming with a hint of green, but in summer abundant with waves like a dry yellow sea.

I usually wake to birdsong, sweet and sharp. This morning, though, the birds have gone, and the silence outside delays the return of full awareness. The sun is almost up before I come to with a fierce gratitude to have left my dreams behind – I rarely dream, but of late the Furies pursue me through sleep, their wings beating like thunder, voices spiralling into a whirlwind of bestial shrieks; to what end, I do not know, but still they screech, taunting me.

I shake myself fully awake, tasting the relief lying flat offers my knees and back. It is a short-lived pleasure. I remember what I must do, and it gives me no solace. Not waking Mary is an art perfected over decades, and I roll evenly to my side of the bed, spreading my weight, trying not to cough. As I swing my bare feet a clenching pain drives deep into the centre of my chest. It greets me most mornings. For thirty seconds or so, I push my fist in vigorous circles against the skin, as the physicians have instructed me, though it does no good. The rubbing blanches my sternum, bleaching its autumnal red, branching scars to powder white. As the colour seeps back, I almost think they bleed.

Standing, I pull on my stockings and breeches, then my waistcoat, and put my feet in my bedroom slippers. I slip my hand into my pocket so the keys I carry with me at all times brush against my skin, and wrap my fingers about them. They anticipate me, like a handful of gunpowder, a tiny keg that at any moment might rip my hand to fleshy ribbons.

I pad over to the window and peer through, noting how far the wind has dropped. The mercury in the ash barometer on the ledge is high, and the sky, the benign blue of a dunnock’s egg, is still flecked with white feathers. The trees stand so still they might be carved from stone. It did, as I expected, snow overnight, but only a little, so each branch and leaf is iced with a light dust like grated sugar. But the ground bears no ribbons of tiny footprints. There is no sign of any creature passing. The silence is sovereign.

‘Thomas,’ comes Mary’s sleepy voice from the bed. She is cocooned in quilts and blankets, so all I see is her nightcap and the curve behind her knees, usually occupied by the cat, which, this morning, is nowhere nearby.

‘Good morning, wife,’ I say, returning to her side as fresh realisation dawns upon her, and her face moves from contentment to deep unease. She sees I am decided, and stirs more quickly.

‘Wait, and I will be with you,’ she says, beginning to rise. ‘Or perhaps wait until—’

I place my hands on her shoulders. ‘No.’ Then, as she remonstrates, ‘No. I cannot have you in this. I must go alone. And it must be now – I have delayed long enough.’

She takes my hand. Her skin feels tepid, papery, as if the life is seeping out of her. I press her hand close to my chest. I want to keep her here, to protect her. ‘You tremble,’ I say. ‘Have courage. All will be well.’

Even before I have finished, she is shaking her head. She possesses almost no hair on her brows now, and her left eye begins to cloud with cataracts, but still her anger is a sight. ‘How can you say so? You know the danger, Thomas!’

‘Look how far we have come together. Now is not the time to fail in your trust.’ A certainty that might have been courage in the mouth of a younger man sounds wheedling to my ancient ears. And so, it seems, to hers.

‘There is trust, and there is rank foolishness.’ She is out of the bed now, pulling on her warm bedgown.

‘Foolishness?’

Frustration whirls beneath her words. ‘Foolishness is you going up there alone, when…’ A pause. ‘It’s rash.’

‘Let’s have no more talk like this, dear heart,’ I say, as robustly as I can manage. Then, more softly, ‘I don’t know what I will find. And I do not fear what I do not know. Nor should you.’

But this is a lie. Of course I fear what I do not know. What else is there to terrify us?

I cannot blame Mary for her anger, her doubt, even her resentment. Yet I must insist on being alone in this. There is no other choice.

I hold tightly to the keys, though the metal feels like a burning brand against my palm, and go downstairs. I have no appetite – my gullet convulses at the thought of food – but collect wine, bread and a cold breast of pigeon from the pantry. I light a fire and heat a bowl of onion soup, then place all on a board before kneeling to pray, asking that God not forsake me until my task is completed. I almost convince myself that I am heard. When finished, I rise awkwardly, releasing a laboured grunt. I add a lit candle to the tray, and move towards the stairs.

My hands shake as I walk, and my knees threaten collapse. It is the turn of the year, almost spring, but the house is held in the grip of a voracious cold as in the very dead of winter. I carry the tray up, passing the bedrooms, and come to the door at the end of the corridor. This door is kept locked, always.

I place the tray at my feet and insert the smaller of the keys in the lock. It turns with a click. As I open the door, for the briefest of moments, I smell the sea, taste the salt freshness of the ocean against my lips, and it comes back to me: the deafening cry of the wind over the waves and the clap of thunder, drawing ever closer. My ears are alert for the tiniest true sound. The cacophony fades. It is nothing but my fancy.

There are fourteen steps. No windows. At the top stands a second door of double-timbered oak, locked, and braced with a heavy plank. I built this, and know it will hold fast.

No sound drifts down from above. I retrieve the tray, and raise my foot. Then, without fully deciding to do so, I retract it.

Are you so afraid of the dark? The thought of my cowardice needles me, and I begin the climb.

I reach the last stair. The air feels whisper-thin, as if I have ascended miles, not mere feet, like a Virgil or an Odysseus, though moving in the wrong direction. The house below, with its hearth and scrawny cat licking its hindquarters beneath the kitchen table, might be another world.

I deposit the tray on the floor, taking care not to extinguish the candle, and haul the length of wood from its brackets as I have done thousands of times.

The door squeaks open. My shape blocks out the light from the candle, so the space ahead is muted and shadowed. My breath is harsh in my ears, my fear a gobbet of iron in my stomach. The sea smell is nearly unbearable now.

The attic is simply furnished and clean. On one side there is a bed, with a warm coverlet, a bureau of drawers, several rugs, and a washing station. A piss pot stands beneath the basin, empty. On the other side, not original to the house – I put it in myself – a small window allows in light and has a view of the fields beyond, and beneath this window is a wooden bench-seat. Its resident’s face is set towards the window. Steel-grey hair, turning white at the roots, hangs loose and long, partly obscuring the unbleached linen nightgown beneath, almost reaching the shackles encircling the ankles.

I wait.

‘Do you smell it?’ The voice is gritty, the cost of long years of quiet. ‘The sea?’

‘No,’ I say, finally. My voice cracks.

The figure turns to face me, the nightgown falling open at the throat, revealing pale skin criss-crossed by a pattern of faded lines, oxblood red, like a river and its tributaries. They reach as high as the left clavicle. ‘Are we near?’

In the few moments before it is obvious I am not going to answer, I am aware of being assessed. I am the subject of a gaze. A short laugh is released like a weapon. ‘The years lie upon you like treacheries, Thomas.’ I do not contest the verdict. I am too much distracted, because I know this voice. It is the one I have feared. Something I have clung to crumbles inside me.

‘I brought you food,’ I say, finally, holding out the board.

A single brow goes up. ‘You would break bread with me?’

I move several steps closer. ‘I would feed you. You cannot feed yourself, at least not easily.’

The gaze shifts downwards to the shackles, the chain linking ankles to wrists. ‘Then, by all means, we shall eat,’ comes that wry voice again.

I lower myself to the bench, noting the smell of sweat, of unwashed flesh, of shed skin. A bowl and a few jugs of heated water is the limit of what I will be able to haul up the stairs myself, but I resolve to do it. Mary will take me to task and insist on doing it for me, but from now on, I vow, nobody but I will enter this room.

I lift the cup so that the wine might be reached, and wait. When the cup is half-emptied, I lower my hands and offer the bread, holding it steady as the small, white incisors tear off a chunk and chew in delicate bites. I continue to offer the bread until it is gone, then spoon white soup from the bowl. ‘I remember you liked this, before,’ I say, to no reply. With the food finished, I look upon closed lids of translucent flesh, webbed with veins of watchet blue, with barely a wrinkle to signal the passage of the years.

A sudden movement in the corner draws my attention. A flash of brown and pale blue; a lone jay, sheltering from the chill, having strayed down the chimney in error, perhaps. Or a hole in the thatch that will need to be mended. The jay scampers on spindly legs. It cannot find the way it came in, and flutters between the beams, cawing in panic. I sympathise, but cannot see any gap through which I might thrust its struggling form, even if I could catch it.

‘This is a new world.’ I hear these words and turn back, eager to see the expression accompanying them, but the same bland nothingness prevails.

‘New, how?’ I ask. ‘What do you remember?’ I scold myself for asking two questions, but the mistake does not cost me my answer.

‘Smaller. Shrivelled.’ The words are released quietly, not without contempt.

‘How has it shrivelled?’

‘Ideas. Beliefs. Faith.’

‘How do you know?’

The jay lands by our feet and skitters away towards the bed. ‘How does that creature know it must have the open skies? That this room, however sheltered, will be its death, such that it will break its wings to pulp against its walls?’

The bird, which was pecking at a floorboard, alights awkwardly. Then it rushes for the window, seeming to sense its near freedom. But it has not counted on the glass, and falls, squawking, back to the floor.

‘I do not know,’ I admit. Then, tentatively, ‘What do you remember from before?’

But I can get no further answers for my pains.

When I look again, the jay is gone. I search for it, in the following days, and find its untouched remains languishing beneath the bureau.

I descend the stairs, fasten the door behind me and place the key in my pocket. Only once the door is locked do I rest my forehead against the wood and breathe. I stay there for several minutes, gentling the churning currents of my mind. But peace does not return. My heartbeat is out of kilter with the rest of me. Almost without realising it, I have been scratching myself. Across my chest and arms, my scars have come alive and seem to crawl across the surface of my body, producing a pernicious need to rub, to remove the skin like snake scale, just to be rid of them.

You will never be rid of them.

The words rise inside me. Never. Never.

I need Mary.

Downstairs, I call out to her. I go through the kitchen to the parlour and the study. She is not in the house and my greatcoat is missing from its hook.

The doorframe is wreathed in hard frost and ivy. Displaced shards of ice hit the ground like broken glass as I brush past, and my feet indent the thin dusting of snow. The ferocious cold is an unlikely ally; the air purges my lungs like fire.

‘Mary!’

I pass the bare vegetable patch on my right and the pig in its sty on my left. Though the ground is hard, the straight rows and absence of straggling grasses sing of time lavished upon it. This is where Mary is so often to be found. She erects fences against rabbits and wears her fingers to calluses to create trellises, which, though melancholy now, at the end of winter, in the summer will hum with bees and perfumed blooms, the children of her heart.

The north-west gate leads to the trees I saw from my window this morning. The gate is stuck. As I push on the knotted slats, it resists, requiring my full weight to swing it. How I miss my old strength, the careless vigour of my arm! I’m weak, now. This rickety thing will outlast me.

In the orchard, my shadow flees before me, tree to tree. The shorn branches that usually whisper to one another, their lonely fingers reaching out for the comfort of touch, are caught in the silence. ‘Mary?’

She huddles in my coat against the drystone wall, facing out and away. I see her shoulders are shaking before I am within twenty feet of her. ‘Mary?’ She is carrying something, cradling it.

When she turns, I see it in her hands: the little corpse, a tattered bundle of dove grey and brown, as stiff as dried leather. Her hands, their palms laced with the faint mottled scars of so long ago, are red and sore with the cold.

I move closer. ‘What’s happened?’ I say, though I can see. She cannot get the words out. The cat was old, I tell myself. Sixteen years last winter. And slow, with blunted teeth, easy prey to a fox or badger.

‘He h-hardly went outside,’ she said, between halting breaths. ‘Then last night I couldn’t find him.’

I fumble for words. It has been so long since we were grieved. ‘Let me bury him,’ I say, finally.

She shakes her head, wiping the stream from her nose. ‘The ground is too hard.’

‘I’ll manage.’

I take him from her hands. He is – was – an ancient, dringling thing, useless at ratting and not much better at controlling his bladder, and, like most good cats with adoring mistresses, he worshipped her, and reserved for me only a frosty disdain and an insolent swish of the tail.

I examine him all over as Mary watches, a strange, bright look in her eyes. He must have been out here all night. He is almost frozen solid, his grizzled fur beaded with snow. I run my hands through it, expecting torn flesh, broken bones, dried blood, but there is no mark anywhere. Death came quietly.

‘Old age,’ I say, cautiously. ‘And the cold. It is a natural end.’

Mary spits. ‘It’s been less than a day. It blights all it touches. And it has always targeted those I love. What happens when it turns on you?’

I lay him on the ground. She waits another moment for my answer, but then stalks back inside. I nearly go after her, but search out my spade instead.